Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  When I reached the door, a voice came from deep within the kitchen:

  “Nice to meet you. Professor.”

  It was a sweet voice. I heard it over and over as I drove away—in my head the words were clear, but they seemed to come from far away.

  * * *

  Inside the Hall of Man, I set Keno’s ball on the autopsy gurney, just above his upturned hands, making Keno seem to shrug about his missing body. The phone in my office upstairs was ringing like mad, but I didn’t have the key and I didn’t care. The campus was deserted—was it a weekend, a holiday?—so that my phone was the only sound in the building, and I could hear its faint plea through the corridors, even in here.

  I sat on my new silver stool, absently scratching at my crotch as I wheeled up and down the Hall of Man, Pleistocene glaciers advancing and retreating in the exhibits like some flipbook of history. Humans evolved and devolved with each shove of my feet. I’d push off one wall, and in a blur one hundred thousand years would pass, evidenced in the posture of a Clovis, reflected in the eye of a Cro-Magnon. Everywhere in these dioramas, I felt the hand of Peabody—in the blood-tinted authority of his cave paintings, in the way his depiction of a sunset over glaciers turned the ice below the color of watermelon meat, or the way runty dogs cowered, conniving, in the periphery of humanity. Peabody was the constant as millennia flew past. He was proof that people could transcend time, that no one was ever lost, if someone was left to tell your story.

  I rolled back and forth until he was a presence in the room. Not that Peabody was standing there talking or anything. I just felt him, the way he cocked his head when you spoke, that indulgent smile he cast while he listened. I heard the rubber tip of his cane going cush, cush, as it helped him up stairs, saw his pediatrician’s hands turn a bone, carefully, as if there was only so much patience an artifact had before it got stubborn and fitful.

  And then there was a faint, low sound in the room, much different from the stool’s casters, or the thud of my boots off the wall. I stopped rolling. “Peabody?” I whispered.

  The lights hummed. Air circulated in the vents. I wheeled to the autopsy table, my eyes fixed on Keno’s ball. Leaning over the cold steel, I put my ear to the fossilized mud. At first, there was only a staticky sound. Then there was fluctuation, rhythm, like blood in your ears, and I began to hear what sounded like weather, elemental and faint, some ancient meteorology. There was wind buffeting, and the pepper of gust-driven snow. A human call came from this cloak of snow, an urgent whisper held in an eternity I saw as white. I closed my eyes. All was preservative-white, the white that spins forever inside a souvenir globe, the kind you give a kid who didn’t make the journey, who was left at home, and I didn’t need a translator to understand Keno’s lonesome tune.

  The phone was still ringing when I left, and I knew where I must go. I dropped the van in gear and sidled out toward the casino. It was a perfect day for digging—the sky clear, the temp above zero—and as I passed grid after grid of snowed-over fields, I could imagine great finds under all of them. All the lost answers, all the missing pieces, were out there, I felt, waiting for me to find them. I looked for that black GTO when I coasted off the casino road. Then I remembered it was sitting at the bottom of the lake, rump to bumper with a Corvette, their dull headlights illuminating the petroglyphs above like some ancient drive-in movie.

  I parked the van on the side of the road, and set out to dig. As I crossed the fields toward Keno, wind-driven ice crystals cut at my skin. Maybe I’d been rolling around a little too much in the Hall of Man, but I half expected to see herds of woolly camels hoofing up the snow in search of roots, or great teratorns circling the sky above. I followed the now worn path from the highway to Eggers’ mastodon-tusk lodge, squinting into the distance to catch sight of my team. Spades of mud flew from the excavation site, surely the work of Eggers’ arms, and a figure squatting, square-shouldered, her profile noble, was Trudy.

  I stepped carefully through the detritus of humanity—old bones and burned sticks, camp scraps and lumpy latrinecicles—until I stood at the edge of the pit, now knee-deep in places.

  I put my hands on my hips and addressed them: “Today, we are scientists.”

  Eggers planted his makeshift spade and leaned on it. Trudy lowered her digging antler.

  “Life is full of rituals in which people celebrate the living,” I continued. “Today, however, we commit to the dead. Today, we show allegiance to the missing. We declare that the departed matter, that the absent, the unaccounted, and the truant walk alike before science.”

  My team fell silent while I surveyed the dig. The long shadow of a human was beginning to emerge. Various bones had been felt out and left in situ, and I cast my eyes upon the yellowed Pixy Stix of a Homo sapiens. Mentally, I tried to identify these fragments as those of a gravesite, a crime scene, a last stand, or a lost soul. I noted the flat back of what had to be a femur, knuckle pointing south. Did Keno die on her stomach? Would the Clovis bury her this way? Did they believe in the heavens or the underworld? Was showing your back to a god a sign of trust, as the Anasazi people believed, or an insult, as most cultures agreed?

  “Trudy,” I said, “dig over here. That’s where we’ll find the torso.”

  She rolled her eyes, as if to say, But we found the fingers over there.

  “Dr. Hannah,” she said, “there’s something—”

  I lifted my hand. “Eggers, forget the earthwork. I need you sifting over here for foot bones. I’ll take care of this femur.” I eyed them. “And let’s not fall victim to laxity and sloth, people. We have a mission here. She’s depending on us.”

  I clapped my hands together. “Chop-chop,” I said.

  No one moved. “What?” I asked. “Just what is the problem here?”

  Trudy leaned forward and grabbed an animal skin that was lying in the pit. When she removed it, there was another sphere, just like the last one, half exposed in the mud. She lifted her eyebrows. “It’s not that simple,” she said.

  I dropped to my knees. “Who found this?” I asked.

  Eggers gestured with his spade. “Trudy had the honor this time,” he said.

  I examined the sphere, though it was obviously of the same variety—similar shape, palm-printed texture, pitted striations from river weeds. It was electric to the touch. “Do you know what this means?” I asked.

  Eggers smiled. “That we’ve found a two-headed Clovis?”

  “Curb that insolence,” I said. “This means we have a grave on our hands. No hunter-gatherer would carry two of these heavy, ungainly things. These spheres were placed here, with great significance, by the people Keno left behind.”

  “Why here?” Trudy asked. “What’s significant about this place?”

  Ignoring the casino and the highway, I tried to see the landscape as it was twelve thousand years ago. Distant bluffs marked the final reach of a great glacial hand, its long fingers of ice clutched in a last grip—reaching southward, yet receding north. Mist and fog would have been constant, with curtains of cold whipping off the ice, and all around were places where the retreating glaciers deposited their icebound cargo—boulders, bones, and minerals, all churned up from a thousand glacial quarries. Might this have been a place of reverence to Clovis, a place of connection to a hundred thousand years of icy past? Or was this where the ice handed them pink quartz and obsidian, carted here from Canada?

  “Trudy,” I said, “Keno will tell us. If we ask the right questions, she’ll let us know.”

  Her eyes lacked focus. She didn’t seem to be listening.

  “Trudy?” I waved my hand in front of her face.

  She lifted her hand and pointed toward the road. Gerry’s cruiser was pulling up, followed by Sheriff Dan’s Blazer and a powder-blue sedan from which emerged two men in matching yellow parkas. The four of them consulted, then inspected my van, the men in yellow shining flashlights in all the windows, even though it was broad daylight.

  In the distance, we saw Gerr
y gesture wildly, then point in our direction.

  “That’s not a good sign, is it?” Trudy asked.

  Eggers fell in beside me. The three of us stood in a row, shielding our eyes. “Things don’t look so bad,” Eggers said. “The cops never talked it over before arresting me before.”

  “Arresting you for what?” Trudy asked. “Speeding in that pink Porsche of yours?”

  “It’s champagne,” Eggers said.

  “Let’s keep some focus here,” I told them.

  Did Eggers really have a Porsche?

  That’s when Sheriff Dan kicked the tire of my van and nodded his head, and the four of them headed our way, one of the men in yellow talking on a radio as they marched in the cold. I know it’s hard to believe, dear colleagues of tomorrow, but history was once governed by the laws of private property, and anthropology, more often than not, was a crime.

  Eggers clapped once and rubbed his hands together. “Trudy, you go on. Dr. Hannah and I will take care of things. We’ll cover for you.”

  Trudy laughed. “Cover for me? You’re the one who snared the deputy’s dog.”

  “Come, now,” I cautioned them. “We’re a team. Both of you better hit the road quick. I’ll face this menace alone.”

  Eggers wouldn’t budge. “Some team,” he said. “What happened to ‘Today, we are scientists’ and ‘Today, we commit to the dead’?”

  “Yeah,” Trudy said, “don’t we have a mission?”

  “Would you two just get out of here?” I asked. “I know how these guys operate. I know their language.”

  “I fear no authority,” Eggers said. “Growing up in the guest quarters of your own house will teach you that. So will weekly boxing matches with a father who never, never let you win.”

  “I’m not scared of them,” Trudy added. “I’ve come up against North Korean MPs.”

  “Get out of here,” I told them. “Now.”

  Eggers pushed off and began walking away. Trudy fell in behind.

  I turned to face our new guests.

  When Gerry was close enough to shout, he pointed at me.

  “That’s him,” he yelled. “He’s the one who killed my dog.”

  Sheriff Dan entered our camp, flanked by his team. He strode up to me, his eyes gray and dry in the cold, his voice down-homey yet formal.

  “Morning, Henry,” he said, the crop of his jacket flapping in the wind. “How’s your father? I haven’t crossed paths with him in some time.”

  By “crossed paths,” Sheriff Dan meant the funeral.

  “Dad’s fine,” I said. “He’s coping.”

  “Dog killer,” Gerry said.

  Sheriff Dan ignored him. “Things sure haven’t been the same down at the courthouse without Janis. Everyone feels your loss.”

  Sheriff Dan was my father’s age, so when he said this, sounding as though it came from the heart, I had to nod, even though I barely knew the man. He hailed from the upstanding side of town, lived on a street where people didn’t pirate cable television, didn’t clear their sidewalks by snowblowing the drifts into neighbors’ yards. The Sheriff Dans of the world paced off the jurisdiction of their existence with passes through the Rotary Youth car washes, Sunday Fellowship pancake breakfasts, and the occasional ant line out to the cemetery. I kept my distance from them: they’d smile and tell jokes as they cinched people’s handcuffs; they’d affably discuss church events as they evicted the poor. They were happy to go through the motions of life, seemed to connect truly to no one, and were therefore capable of anything.

  I eyed the men in yellow parkas. They both had broomy mustaches and thinning hair. I couldn’t tell them apart behind their sunglasses. One of them pointed to the figures walking away toward the casino, their forms sharp, then dull in jets of wind. “Are those your associates?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” I said.

  He just stared at me.

  Then his partner handed me a photo of a black Subaru, up on blocks in front of a corncrib. “Do you recognize this car?” he asked.

  I shook my head no.

  He produced another photo, held it close to my face. “What about this one?”

  This picture showed a warehouse floor filled with mechanical parts, some of them spray-painted black. “I’m not sure I see a car,” I said.

  Knowingly, he asked, “How many transmissions do you own?”

  The question struck a philosophical note in me. I thought of my Corvette at the bottom of the lake. Was it still mine? Wasn’t it now in the public domain, like Keno’s spear point or the bell Eggers found from Meriwether Lewis’ lost boat?

  “Give me a minute, would you?” I asked him.

  He smiled, then pulled out a notepad, jotted something down.

  “Look,” I said, “what’s this about?”

  “These fellows,” Sheriff Dan said, “came down from Sioux Falls to look at something. And now it’s missing.”

  “Gone like something you love,” Gerry said through his teeth. “A little fellow you’ll never see again.”

  Involuntarily I looked over to the stretching hoop next to Eggers’ lodge. On it, pulled tight with sinew, was a fresh pelt.

  A radio squawked, and one of the men in yellow reached to his belt. Without looking, he clicked it off, then said, “Tell us about the moniker King of Spades.”

  “Moniker?” I asked.

  “You know,” he said, “a street name. Are you known to your acquaintances as the King of Spades?”

  I knew what a moniker was, but before I had a chance to defend myself, the other one asked, “Do you have any tattoos?” He toed his boot through several stray baby-back ribs, inspecting them, while his partner began nosing around the site. “Do you like pork?” he asked me, though I was watching his sidekick pull back the flap of Eggers’ lodge—he winced at the smell, shone his flashlight around inside, and asked, “You’re sympathetic to the Indian way, aren’t you?” Together, the two of them bent to examine a frozen segment of feces. One popped on a rubber glove and picked it up. The frosty crust shined in the light. Very closely, they studied it.

  The one wearing the glove pointed the turd toward me.

  “Would you like to explain the fur in this object?” he asked.

  Gerry looked horrified. “Lord, no,” he said. “Not Spark!”

  “That fur’s not in,” I told them. “It’s on. Those little mutts were running everywhere. They were the ones rummaging through the latrine. We don’t do our business in camp. We’re scientists!”

  “Who, exactly, is ‘we’?” Sheriff Dan asked.

  Gerry was trembling with fury. “His name was Spark,” he said, “and he was a Pomeranian, not a mutt.”

  “Look, Gerry—” I said, backing up.

  “Pomeranians are an ancient and noble breed,” Gerry said, nearly stammering. “They were miniaturized by the Norse from Icelandic sledding dogs.”

  With each step backward, Gerry came closer. I looked to Sheriff Dan for support, but he just shook his head. The duo from Sioux Falls was heading for the excavation pit. “You gentlemen can’t go over there,” I called to them.

  Gerry reached up and poked me in the chest.

  “Hey,” he said, “we’re talking about Pomeranians, here. As if you even care. I could loan you a couple videos on the topic, in case you’re ever curious about the animals you kill.”

  A yellow blur flashed across the ditch. One of the men knelt in the mud and pulled out a pen that telescoped into a pointer or some kind of prod. Then his partner joined him, walkie-talkie in hand. “Looks like we’ve got some human remains,” he radioed in.

  “You officers are going to have to go,” I called. “I’m not joking—there’s serious science going on here.”

  Sheriff Dan tensed at the word “remains.” He lifted a hand to quiet Gerry, then took my shoulder. “I’ve got a thermos of coffee in the squad car,” he said to me. “What say we wait in the cruiser while these boys do their work.”

  The look in his eye scared t
he crap out of me.

  It was here that I felt my first climactic moment. Within Sheriff Dan’s calm voice of concern lurked a possible new life, one laden with shame and disgrace. In this other life, I was not a man of science but a fast-talking pilferer of antiquities. It is not until you’re old that you come to realize there’s no such thing as real climax at all—such cairns on life’s journey are only monuments to your thirst for drama, markers to guide the trailing nostalgia. But you can’t know that at the time. As Sheriff Dan offered me a cup of coffee, my spine glassed over. It would not be the last time I felt weak in the face of climax’s threatening illusion: soon the river would deliver to me teams of corpse-eating dogs, and within weeks, the time would come for me to hunt down the last Russian boy on earth.

  I looked around. Everything was moving in slow motion. The men in yellow were kneeling in the mud. They went straight for that strange orb, their hands getting grubby with matrix, and then came that sucking sound as they pulled the orb from the muck.

  “Do not touch that object,” I yelled, but it was too late.

  Did I really shout that warning? Were my hands about to become “savage instruments,” as the judge later described them? Gerry reached for his cuffs. Sheriff Dan gave me that warm, parental smile, the one I was always a sucker for, while two men from Sioux Falls rapped the butt of a flashlight on a twelve-thousand-year-old grave offering, listening for anything that might rattle inside. It was as if I was there, and I wasn’t there. Something went quiet and still in me. My limbs felt ghostly. There was Eggers’ rodent stick, leaning against his lodge. Suddenly it was in my hands.

  “Get away from Keno,” I warned them. “Return her ball to the pit.”

  The four of them stared curiously at the long, willowy stick I was brandishing.

  I jabbed the rodent stick in the air, its three sharp tips hissing, but none of them seemed afraid. Looking around, I realized there was no one, anywhere, to help me.